Study: Organ Donor Facebook Status Increases Number Of Donors

A new study published in the American Journal of Transplantation on June 18 showed that the social network gave a 21-fold boost to the number of people who registered themselves as organ donors in a single day.

“The short-term response was incredibly dramatic, unlike anything we had ever seen before in campaigns to increase the organ donation rate. And at the end of two weeks, the number of new organ donors was still climbing at twice the normal rate,” study leader Dr. Andrew M. Cameron, an associate professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a press release. “If we can harness that excitement in the long term, then we can really start to move the needle on the big picture. The need for donor organs vastly outpaces the available supply and this could be a way to change that equation.”

The number of people who have registered as organ donors has a little more than doubled since 1989, but the number of people who need organ donations has increased more than six times in the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Currently, there are 118,489 people waiting for an organ. Eighteen people die each day waiting for their transplant, and one donor can save up to eight lives.

Researchers looked at data from online motor vehicle registration websites and Facebook on May 1, 2012, the day Facebook enabled the organ donation option. In total, 57,451 updated their profiles to include their organ donor status. There were 13,012 new online organ registrations across the U.S., meaning there was a 21.2 times increase from the average 616 daily registrations the first day of the program.

The rates changed from state to state. Michigan’s organ donor registrations rose seven times over its daily average, while Georgia saw a whopping 109-fold increase over its typical daily statistics.

Over the next 12 days, the number of registrations slightly decreased, but it was still two times higher than the average daily rate by the end of the study period.